Oudry, engineer of the Civita
Vecchia railway: and a French ecclesiastic of a respectable age and
corpulence. This reverend personage, who was nowise disinclined to
argumentation, and who had just left a country where the priests are
never wrong, took to holding-forth after dinner upon the merits of the
Pontifical Government. I answered as well as I could, like a man
unaccustomed to public speaking. Driven to my last entrenchments, and
called upon to relate some fact which should not redound to the Pope's
credit, I chose, at hazard, a recent event then known to all Rome, as
it was speedily about to be to all Europe. My honourable interlocutor
met my statement with the most unqualified, formal, and unhesitating
denial. He accused me of impudently calumniating an innocent
administration, and of propagating lies fabricated by the enemies of
religion. His language was so sublimely authoritative, that I felt
confounded, overpowered, crushed, and, for a moment, I asked myself
whether I had not really been telling a lie.
The story I had related was that of the boy Mortara.
But I return to Rome and our travellers in the trumpery line. Those we
overheard before are already gone. But their places have been quickly
filled. They follow one another, like vapours rising from the ocean,
and they are as much like one another as one sea-wave is to its
predecessor. See them laying-in their stocks of Roman _souvenirs_ at
the shops in the Corso and the Via Condotti.
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